Bugs Bunny and Friends Coming to the WAG

Bugs Bunny. Porky Pig. Tweety and Sylvester. They’ll all be at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from March 5 to May 30 as part of the exhibition The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons.

Within the last decades, the Warner Bros. cartoon studio has earned both critical and popular acclaim as the producers of the finest, funniest, and most inventive animated shorts ever made. The Hollywood studio developed and perfected the kind of antic, irreverent, street-smart humour that has characterized much of short-subject animation ever since. Along the way, the Warner shop won six Academy Awards, and created more cartoon stars than any other studio, including Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, and Tweety and Sylvester.

“Warner Bros. made cartoons that were brash, reckless, and filled with topical references, bringing animation into the thick of contemporary life,” says Mary Reid, Curator of Contemporary Art and Photography. “This exhibition explores the elaborate creative process that supported the making of these classic cartoons, using examples of Warner Bros. production art from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. Visitors will see cels, model sheets, story sketches, character layout drawings, animation drawings, concept and background paintings, and promotional materials. It will give them a real sense of how cartoons are created.”

All works in the exhibition are from the collection of Stephen Schneider who has been collecting Warner Bros. artifacts, many of them rare and precious, for over 30 years.

WAG Director Stephen Borys is confident this exhibition will appeal to a large audience. “The generation who grew up watching these cartoons at the movie theatre and on television will want to bring their children or grandchildren. And we have developed a wide variety of programs that will appeal to all ages, from a pancake breakfast where you’re invited to come in your pyjamas to art workshops to cultural studies talks.”

Admission to the exhibition is $5 for Gallery members, $13 for adults, $11 for seniors and students, $9 for children ages 6 to 12, free for children under 6, and $23 for a family (up to 2 adults and 4 children under 18).